An important part of this rule, as I said in first post, would be that this penalty does not affect attacks against cities or fortresses (or any other tile with no stack death).
The idea is that units moving together protect each other and do not need fortresses nor stacking to advance in enemy territory.

As I see it, with default rules, humans do not create fronts of units in open field because it is much better to stack them in cities or fortress. The only available strategy to advance in enemy territory is to move your best defensive unit to the best defensive terrain, or to build fortresses.
My suggestion tries to make these waves of units a valid tactic, as we see in most wargames.

In civ5 it is not allowed to stack units, and units get a defensive bonus if there are friendly units in adjacent tiles, similar to my suggestion. In civ5 there are also bonus to attack if the enemy is surrounded by allied units, but I think only one of those bonuses is needed to simlute the importance of breaking the enemy front line, as we see in WW2 battles.

In my opinion this rule will not affect the way you defend your cities (units stacked in cities and fortress still the best choice), but the way you attack the enemy cities.
Together with the rules "restrictinfra", "no unreachableprotects" and "occupychance=100" I think freeciv could become a fun tactical game.

> So essentially what you are saying is that as soon as a unit
> comes against multiple units, it will be at a disadvantage
> against all of them

Yes, sounds to me like in practice this would give constant defense bonus for defense lines (where units on different tiles provide ZOC-protection to each other). AI does not build such lines, so maybe it wouldn't be big problem for someone playing against AI only (but would hurt any attempts of AI to attack human player defense lines). Line of fortresses (+50%, protection against stack-death) on hills-range (+50%) with fortified (+50%) units is already very hard to break even with superior units.

So essentially what you are saying is that as soon as a unit comes against multiple units, it will be at a disadvantage against all of them. I have to say i don't like that idea. Any attacker should be able to still move 'forward' and attack in one direction without penalty. Otherwise it is doomed as soon as it becomes adjacent to that second unit.

You mentioned WW2, and it is in thinking about those battles that we have to consider this idea. Many of the great actions then were won by fast units breaking through enemy lines, and EVEN THOUGH THEY HAVE ENEMIES ON BOTH SIDES, carrying the attack through to softer targets in the rear area. Your idea would make that practically impossible to simulate in game terms.

I consider this separate from the defender in impassible terrain. I still agree that those attacks should be disallowed, or limited to pure bombardment.

I did not explain properly the first verion. I'll use your question about the surrounded warrior to try to clarify both versions.

version 1)Penalty when a unit adjacent to an enemy unit attacks any other tile.

version 2) Penalty when a unit adjacent to an enemy unit attacks another tile adjacent to an enemy unit.

The first attack of a surrounded warrior will always be penalized in both versions.

In v1, if the warrior kills 7 of the surrounding enemies, he can attack the 8th enemy without penalty because there is no other enemy adjacent. All attacks would be penalized except the last one.

In v2, if the warrior kills the 4 enemies in the corners (or the 4 in the cross), he can attack to the other 4 enemies without penalties because the target tile would not be adjacent to another enemy.

Version2 uses exactly the same rules than ZoC and I guess it would be easier to implement.
I'm glad you like it, because I think freeciv really needs some kind of tactical rule. I was working on a WW2 scenario and I realized that battles without research/building are plain boring. You just need to stack pile all your units in a fortress over the best defensive position and attack other locations from there.

A similar rule easier to implement would be:
"do not allow to attack a tile where the unit can not move due to ZoC effect"
This way the limitation caused by ZoC would be the same for movement and attack.

I personally prefer a customizable penalty to attack, but this one would also allow interesting tactics to protect your units, that I find very realistic, specially if ZoC is enabled for Naval units too.

I'll see if I can create a patch for this one by myself, but I'd prefer to find some developer who find this rule interesting.

After some time playing other wargames, and reading about civ5 combat system, I figured out a simple rule that would make more tactical the combat in freeciv.

The rule would be:
" When a unit is placed adjacent to an enemy unit, it receives a penalty to attack against other enemy units. "

Such rule would take advantage of the already implemented Zone of Control system and I think it could be easy to implement, though I'm not sure.

With the current rules, I think the zone of control does not really affect the military tactics since it can be easely bypassed by using one single explorer or diplomat. And I always found it odd that you can attack an enemy unit placed in a tile that the ZoC rules do not allow you to move to.
This weird effect becomes more evident when I enable the rule "occupy chance = 100%" (where units are forced to move to the target tile after a succesfully attack). With "occupychance=100", in some cases units can destroy the enemy without moving to the target tile, due to the ZoC.
My suggested rule would affect only those cases where the unit is already adjacent to an enemy and tries to attack another adjacent enemy, and it should not affect the attack against cities or fortresses.

In my opinion, the result of this rule would be:
- when you move your units in open field (out of cities or fortress), you can create a front of defensive units, and to force the enemy to attack your flancks first, in order to avoid this new "ZoC penalty to attack".
- it makes it easier to protect vulnerable units in open field without the need of fortress or mountains or stacking. If you advance with your artillery in the center of a squared formation (9 tiles), the enemy must destroy 4 of the surrounding units before they can attack the center tile without penalties.
- it would be easier to survive for units surrounding a city. The sieged units placed inside the city would get this "ZoC penalty to attack" against all the surrounding units except the last one.
- it would encourage to create different army compositions and different advancing formations to adapt to the terrain.

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